Article by Derek Hunter in Townhall
You Can’t Say That On Television (In Canada)
When I was a kid, there was a Canadian TV show called, “You can’t do that on television.” It was on in the United States thanks to Nickelodeon, if I remember correctly. The odds are high that you don’t remember the show or never heard of it. Either way, it is responsible for the introduction of “green slime,” the gross stuff poured on countless heads in the decades since. On the show, at any point during any of the skits, if someone said, “I don’t know” they had a bucket of slime dumped on them. If the show were on now, there are a whole host of words the leftists running the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) would not only slime you over, they’d cancel you for the rest of your life.
There’s a weird thing that happens to Americans; when a country is like ours – with similar pop culture, food choices, and language – we assume they are like us when it comes to our freedoms too. Hugh Jackman is Australian, and you know a lot of Australian actors and have seen Australian movies, so you assume they view free speech the way we do, for example. They decidedly do not.
If you’ve been paying attention to the news from down under you have noticed the sheer panic about COVID in Australia. States locked down, mask mandates outside, people limited to traveling only a few kilometers from their houses, etc. It’s nuts. They are not like us in any way beyond the superficial, and we should all be thankful we are not like them beyond that either.
And just because Canada produces a bunch of harmless comedians and good beer, does not mean they are like us either. I know, I grew up a short drive from Canada in Detroit. They’re harmless people, overly polite most of the time, but they are not like us. But sadly, we’re becoming more like them, and the rest of the world, more than we’d like to admit or ever should.
The CBC this week released an article entitled, “Words and phrases you may want to think twice about using.” It’s as dumb as you’d expect anything with that title to be.
They consulted “anti-racist” activists and other manner of left-wing made up titles, people whose job it is to be offended on behalf of people who aren’t offended themselves, to draw up a list of words and phrases needing to be struck from the dictionary. Among them: ghetto, inner city, spooky, grandfathered in, spirit animal, first-world problem, dumb, lame, tone deaf, and lowest on the totem pole.
Unfortunately for anyone born in a ghetto, the inner city mentality leftists instill in people through the education system is downright spooky. But it’s been grandfathered in because control is kind of the spirit animal of the left. It’s a total first-world problem, but dumb people do lame things and are tone deaf to what works and what doesn’t. Making people’s lives worse should matter, but when you’re the lowest on the totem pole, liberals don’t care how much damage they do to you.
That paragraph wouldn’t get me arrested in Canada, at least not yet, but it will likely soon be a hate crime.
Each one of these words and phrases has a twisted justification as to why they need to go, each more pathetic than the last. And they have the requisite leftist providing some of the dumbest, “someone might be offended if they spent six months doing extensive research in a desperate scramble to find something to be offended by” justifications you’ll ever see.
For “first-world problems,” for example, they found a vacant activist to say, “When we're saying first world, we're putting them at the top ... What does it convey? Why do we have to use these prefixes, which kind of dehumanize some country or some human being or a group?”
Told you they were dumb, didn’t I?
Some countries are better than others, you can tell by the flow of people into this one relative to the armpits around the world people are fleeing. Some people are smarter than others, you can tell by how smart people are conservative and Democrats get the rest.
You can laugh at that article, and even the concept, but stupidity spreads like a cold on a plane. Across this country there are “progressive Democrats” looking at this list and compiling one of their own in their heads. They can’t impose it now, at least not legally, but they will work toward a way to make them all dangerous to use. It won’t be through the force of law or with the power of government (at least not yet), but the force of social pressure. They will ruin the lives of wrong-thinkers in a perfectly legal, completely evil way. They’re already doing it.
